Remembering a Nobel Laureate on the Date of His Birth: Born 14 March 1879 – Albert Einstein, a German-born theoretical physicist and recipient of the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Some quotes from the work of Albert Einstein:

“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”
“Don’t listen to the person who has the answers; listen to the person who has the questions.”
“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”
“A large part of our attitude toward things is conditioned by opinions and emotions which we unconsciously absorb as children from our environment. In other words, it is tradition—besides inherited aptitudes and qualities—which makes us what we are. We but rarely reflect how relatively small as compared with the powerful influence of tradition is the influence of our conscious thought upon our conduct and convictions.”
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Imagination is the language of the soul. Pay attention to your imagination and you will discover all you need to be fulfilled.”
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
“Everything that exists in your life, does so because of two things: something you did or something you didn’t do.”
“The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.”
“The height of stupidity is most clearly demonstrated by the individual who ridicules something he knows nothing about.”
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.”

This Date in Art History: Born 14 March 1923 – Diane Arbus, an American photographer.

I could fix the leaky pipe
Under the sink, or wander over
And bother Jerry who’s lost. In the bog of his crankcase. I could drive the half-mile down To the local mall and browse Through the bright stables Of mowers, or maybe catch The power-walkers puffing away On their last laps. I could clean The garage, weed the garden, Or get out the shears and Prune the rose bushes back. Yes, a thousand things This beautiful April morning. But I’ve decided to just lie Here in this old hammock, Rocking like a lazy metronome, And wait for the day lilies To open. The sun is barely Over the trees, and already The sprinklers are out, Raining their immaculate Bands of light over the lawns.

“We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw poor people out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars for profit, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power.”

“Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. We become more characteristic of who we are simply by lasting into later years; the older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfillment and confirmation of one’s character.”
“Anytime you’re gonna grow, you’re gonna lose something. You’re losing what you’re hanging onto to keep safe. You’re losing habits that you’re comfortable with, you’re losing familiarity.”
“Not just any talk is conversation; not any talk raises consciousness. Good conversation has an edge: it opens your eyes to something, quickens your ears. And good conversation reverberates: it keeps on talking in your mind later in the day; the next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said. That reverberation afterward is the very raising of consciousness; your mind’s been moved. You are at another level with your reflections.”
“Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.”
“Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering.”
“Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don’t want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure.”
“I like to imagine a person’s psyche to be like a boardinghouse full of characters. The ones who show up regularly and who habitually follow the house rules may not have met other long-term residents who stay behind closed doors, or who only appear at night. An adequate theory of character must make room for character actors, for the stuntmen and animal handlers, for all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts. They often make the show fateful, or tragic, or farcically absurd.”
“Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who’ve been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment.”

Up from wood rot,
wrinkling up from duff
and homely damps,
spore-born and cauled
like a meager seer,
it pushes aside earth
to make a small place
from decay. Bashful,
it brings honeycombed
news from below
of the coming plenty
and everything rising